According to a recent report, bots — automated applications that rove the internet — make up more than 35 percent of all internet traffic. And a report last year from Kaspersky Labs recorded bot attacks against more than 15,000 organizations in 101 countries.
The method of these attacks vary widely depending on their intent and can include everything from DoS, DDoS, password stuffing, vulnerability probing, SQL injection, fraud, content/price scraping, and more.
For example, an airline booking site under one type of bot attack would see seats held for a time, and eventually abandoned, making those seats unavailable to legitimate customers. That means lost revenue. But worse yet, management at the airline might make bad strategic decisions, like reducing the number of flights from one market to another, thinking that the activity from bots had been real customers.
Citrix is tackling this challenge with new bot management capabilities in the Citrix ADC platform. Citrix Bot Management will augment existing Citrix ADC security features, and customers will be able to immediately identify and protect against bot attacks. Citrix Bot Management will include the ability to detect and block bots based on several factors:
- Signature: Citrix researchers have cultivated an active list of thousands of known bots, which the bot management capabilities can identify and block.
- Behavior-based detection: Bots are sneaky and can appear to be human. Citrix Bot Management will pick up on their masquerade through fingerprinting devices as well as other detection mechanisms such as rates of request and block them.
- Malicious IPs addresses: Citrix maintains a constantly updated list of known malicious IPs and will block bots based on origin IP reputation.
- Whitelist and blacklist: Citrix ADC’s bot management capabilities enable customers to maintain their own independent whitelist and blacklist of acceptable and unacceptable application origins.
These capabilities are in addition to those Citrix customers already benefit from, including OWASP Top 10 protection, XSS, SQL injection, and CSRF through our Web App Firewall. Citrix ADC’s bot management capabilities will provide one more tool to enhance customers’ ability to protect their public websites, applications, and APIs.
Citrix Bot Management will be available with the Citrix ADC Premium license.
Looking for more insights? Read the bot management chapter of our Unified Security Guide.
